Monday, June 01, 2009

monday mix tape

File this under the category of "reading outside my tradition". I am pretty much ignorant of the world of design but love the way that blogger and magazine editor Erin Loechner celebrates art and design/artists and designers. I recently stumbled on these short vignettes of a variety of artists talking about the real-life, every-day kind of stuff they deal with. Click on any that interest you; so far, my favorite is "overcoming artist's block":

Finished reading Homer's Odyssey this past week (Fitzgerald translation). Also Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Way. Both have been on my reading list for a couple of years. David Taylor booted my backside during the talk he gave about disciplined disciples during our Worship & Arts retreat.

I enjoyed both. Certainly The Odyssey is more like the thrill of watching an action flick (filled with romance, monsters and reconcilations, of course). Feeling pretty impressed with myself, I sat around the campfire of last weekend's Memorial Day trip reading the centuries-old story. That is until my seventeen-year-old boy said, Oh, Odyssey. I had to read that in ninth grade. Well bully for him, then.

The Violent... like a disturbing, yet gratifying, thriller. That woman can write and I can't wait to dive into the biography I picked up from the new release shelf of my corner library. It's so crazy how a good author weaves words to describe characters that I can identify with -- even, temporarily, to become -- while our circumstances are nothing alike.

For example, this description of the schoolteacher, would-be guardian, Rayber:

He had kept it from gaining control over him by what amounted to a rigid ascetic discipline. He did not look at anything too long, he denied his senses unnecessary satisfactions. ... He was not deceived that this was a whole or a full life, he only knew that it was the way his life had to be lived if it were going to have any dignity at all. He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare hands. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.

I suppose it's a topic for another day, but most days I'm pretty certain I'm made of the same stuff as Rayber.

If you haven't seen it yet, just go now. We celebrated a rare Saturday that all six of us were home by heading to the theatre and we celebrated even further that all six of us loved it, laughed out loud and (most of us) cried, too. Rare, indeed.

Another outcome from that Memorial Day weekend campfire? My friend Lori talked a bunch of us into seeing the classic Bonnie Raitt in Philly this summer. I'm way rusty on her music and gosh-darn determined to catch up enough to make that ticket worth every penny. If you can't sing along on a few tunes, what good is the show?

Tamara Hill Murphy

I am Tamara Murphy: born and raised in a cynical, smalltown Northeast still harboring a penchant for hope and big ideas. Now I live in the bright city of Austin, Texas with my audacious and often-homesick family: two daughters, two sons, one husband.

I believe in the power of the written word. I read and write words to make friends with the ancient, present and future. I write to encourage both you and me to see God's presence through daily practices of art, liturgy and relationship.